LET THEM TURN YOU INTO ONE OF THOSE GIRLS. You promised not to go LA on me.
Me: Don’t worry. I’d have to actually talk to people to go LA.
Scarlett: Crap. Really? That bad?
Me: Worse.
I quickly snap a selfie of me alone on a bench with my half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I smile instead of pout, though, and label with the hashtag #Day14. Those blondes would pout, turn it into an I’m so sexy picture, and then Instagram it. Look how hot I am not eating my sandwich!
Scarlett: Lose the scrunchie. A little too farm girl with that shirt.
I pull my hair loose. This is why I need Scarlett here. Maybe she’s the reason I’ve never been teased before. If we hadn’t met at the age of four, I’d likely be an even bigger dork.
Me: Thanks. Scrunchie officially lost. Consider it burned.
Scarlett: Who’s the hot guy photobombing you?
Me: What?
I squint at my phone. The Batman was looking out the window just as I took my shot. Not photobombing exactly, but captured for posterity. So it turns out Blond and Blonder did have an audience after all. Of course they did. Girls like that always have an audience.
My face flushes red again. Not only am I a big fat loser who eats lunch alone with an unironic scrunchie in her hair, but I’m stupid enough to get caught taking a selfie of this wonderful moment in my life. By a cute guy, no less.
I check the little box next to the picture. Hit delete. Wish it were that easy to erase everything else.
CHAPTER 4
“T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land.’ Anyone read it?” asks Mrs. Pollack, my new AP English teacher. Nobody raises their hand, myself included, though I did read it a couple of years ago, in what now feels like a different lifetime. My mom used to leave poetry books strewn around our house, as if they were part of some unspoken scavenger hunt, a scattering of convoluted clues leading to I don’t know what. When I was bored, I’d pick up the books off her nightstand or from the pile next to the bathtub and randomly flip them open. I wanted to read wherever she had highlighted or scribbled illegible margin notes. I often wondered why a certain line was marked with faded yellow.
I never asked her. Why didn’t I ask her? One of the worst parts about someone dying is thinking back to all those times you didn’t ask the right questions, all those times you stupidly assumed you’d have all the time in the world. And this too: how all that time feels like not much time at all. What’s left feels like something manufactured. The overexposed ghosts of memories.
In “The Waste Land,” my mother had underlined the first sentence and marked it with two exuberant asterisks: “April is the cruellest month.”
Why is April the cruellest month? I’m not sure. Lately, they all seem cruel in their own way. It’s September now: sharp pencils. A new year and not a new year at all. Both too early and too late for resolutions and fresh starts.
My mother’s books are packed up in cardboard boxes and getting moldy in a self-storage unit in Chicago, their paper smell turned damp and dusty. I don’t let myself think about that or about how all matter disintegrates. About how all that highlighting was a waste.
“It’s a four-hundred-thirty-four-line poem. So that’s what, like, four hundred thirty-four tweets?” Mrs. Pollack gets a laugh. She’s young—maybe late twenties—and attractive: leopard-print leggings, leather peep-toe wedges, a silk tank top that shows off her freckled shoulders. She’s better dressed than I am. One of those teachers who the kids have all tacitly agreed to root for, maybe even to admire, since her life doesn’t seem so far out of our reach. She’s something recognizable.
On my first day, she introduced me to the class but didn’t make me stand up and say something about myself, like the rest of my teachers had done. Considerate of Mrs. Pollack to spare me that indignity.
“So, guys, ‘The Waste Land’ is hard. Really, really hard. Like, college-level hard, but I think you’re up for it. Are you up for it?”
She gets a few halfhearted yeses. I don’t say anything. No need to let my nerd flag fly just yet.
“Nuh-uh. You can do better than that. Are you up for it?” Now she gets full-on cheers, which impresses me. I thought the kids here only got excited about clothes and Us Weekly